APT trends report Q2 2020

APT trends report Q2 2020

For more than three years, the Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) at Kaspersky has been publishing quarterly summaries of advanced persistent threat (APT) activity. The summaries are based on our threat intelligence research and provide a representative snapshot of what we have published and discussed in greater detail in our private APT reports. They are designed to highlight the significant events and findings that we feel people should be aware of.


This is our latest installment, focusing on activities that we observed during Q2 2020.


Readers who would like to learn more about our intelligence reports or request more information on a specific report are encouraged to contact ‘[email protected]‘.


The most remarkable findings


On May 11, the UK-based supercomputing center, ARCHER, announced that it would shut down access to its network while it investigated a security incident. The website stated that the “ARCHER facility is based around a Cray XC30 supercomputer (with 4920 nodes) that provides the central computational resource”. At the same time, the German-based bwHPC also announced a security incident and decided to restrict access to its resources. The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, at the time involved in a project to study the small membrane protein of the coronavirus, confirmed that it, and other European high-performance computer facilities, had been attacked and that it had temporarily closed. On May 15, the EGI Computer Security and Incident Response Team (EGI-CSIRT) published an alert covering two incidents that, according to its report, may or may not be related. Both incidents describe the targeting of academic data centers for “CPU mining purposes”. The alert includes a number of IoCs, which complement other OSINT (open-source intelligence) observations. Although we weren’t able to establish with a high degree ..

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